Alloy Networks, an XRP Ledger validator, and its “parallel chain” Xahau shared details of another note spam attack initiated by an XRPL-based service. Tens of thousands of messages were sent to new on-chain wallets to promote a DeFi protocol, and this is not the worst.
30,000 spam messages for XRP wallets: this is what happened
On November 10, 2023, more than 30,000 messages were sent in the “Memos” field, including arbitrary messaging data with a transaction. As the Alloy Networks team noted, this massive spam attack was likely initiated by Magnetic X (MAG), an ecosystem of DeFi services on XRPL.
In addition to the enormous pressure on the XRP Ledger transactional mechanism, this attack damaged the entire blockchain, as the full history servers (archive RPC nodes) would have to store this data forever.
Thomas Silkjær, head of analysis and compliance at the XRP Ledger Foundation, indicated two addresses involved in the attack and opined that the net number of messages sent could exceed 110,000:
~97,000 welcome messages from rNEWSizmnEsBAFxRT8xEUhC6bAk7T3ewK and ~20,000 from rXYShQybgRJD3LVnAYhRVNRMSKYgVnCyU
Representatives from XRPL Labs, a large
As U.Today previously reported, Magnetic X (MAG) has already started a series of note spam attacks. This type of attack involves sending messages to all new activated accounts.
On that occasion, the Magnetic X team stated that the campaign was “educational.”
How to address note spam in XRPL?
Members of the XRP community proposed several solutions to the note spam issues. Some of them believed that the problem would be solved with the activation of the Hooks amendment.
Other enthusiasts suggested imposing the lowest possible transaction fees for sending note messages: one drop, which is one millionth of an XRP, could be charged for each character in the message.
Last but not least, the most radical critics of such a policy recommended Magnetic X (MAG) run its own sidechain to stop wasting XRPL’s computational resources on shady campaigns.
